For nearly six decades, Palestinian writer and human rights lawyer Raja Shehadeh has recorded daily life under occupation, political negotiations, family history and the changing landscape of the West Bank. Now, an archive that he kept largely in a garage in Ramallah has been moved out of the region and into academic collections in the United Kingdom. Shehadeh, 75, began writing his diaries in 1967, when he was 15 and Israel began its occupation of the West Bank. The entries document his work as a legal adviser to the Palestinian negotiating team during peace talks with Israel, meetings with international leaders and his experiences as a lawyer and advocate for human rights. The collection also follows the expansion of Israeli settlements, changes to roads and geography, and Shehadeh’s walks through the West Bank hills. He has said that writing helped him make sense of events and preserve a record of a period he recognized early on as historic. The effort to protect the papers began in earnest after the start of the Gaza war in 2023. Shehadeh feared Israeli military operations could put his garage archive at risk. He recalled earlier episodes in which Palestinian homes and institutions were damaged or had papers destroyed, including during Israel’s 2002 reoccupation of Ramallah. “Maybe they would set fire to them,” Shehadeh said of the documents if soldiers entered his home and found them. He also pointed to the loss of Palestinian journals and private papers during the 1948 displacement of Palestinians, the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon and the 2002 military incursion into Ramallah. Over two years, three people worked with the University of Edinburgh and the University of Exeter to digitize the diaries and related documents page by page. The physical materials were then sent gradually by ordinary mail to avoid attracting attention. The archive is now at Edinburgh, and Exeter has posted thousands of pages online for public access. Some of the diaries offer an intimate account of the 2002 invasion. In one entry, Shehadeh described being confined to his home during a curfew, then driving through empty streets after restrictions were lifted and encountering tanks blocking the road near his office. He also recorded his anger at Palestinian leaders who signed the Oslo-era peace agreements without halting Israeli settlement activity. The collection includes more than Shehadeh’s own writing. It contains papers belonging to his father, Aziz Shehadeh, a prominent Palestinian lawyer who was killed in 1985, as well as material from the younger Shehadeh’s decades-long effort to understand the case. In 2025, Shehadeh obtained Israeli police investigation files related to his father’s killing. He said the records showed that investigators failed to pursue the person he believed had threatened his father over a land dispute. Although the case did not establish who was responsible, Shehadeh said the documents gave him a measure of closure. The archive also preserves a 1949 letter written to Aziz Shehadeh by a business owner displaced to Lebanon, notes from a 1950 refugee meeting in Ramallah and a poem Raja Shehadeh wrote at age 18. Shehadeh said he hopes the diaries will help readers understand how Palestinian life and the West Bank changed over time. For him, preserving the record is connected to “sumud,” or steadfastness: remaining in place, building institutions and sustaining community life despite efforts to make life there unbearable. He said the diaries may ultimately serve human rights and historical truth more powerfully than his books, speeches or public advocacy because they capture events as they unfolded and preserve the uncertainty, frustration and personal consequences behind them.